Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time: Chapter 9
An occasional series of possibly true scenes from a perfectly normal life. Let's call it faction.
Chapter 9: From This Puddle I Can See Your Future
(Want to read previous chapters first? Links at the bottom)
We now found ourselves in possession of a PA, lights, several air-conditioning units, heaters, a cupboard full of wires, bulbs, plugs, a massive stack of half working amps, drum kit parts, assorted chairs, glasses, cups, trays, beer mats, beer, wine, spirits, corkscrews and even the odd lemon or two and a glass of cherries. What we didn’t have was anywhere to put any of it.
At a certain point in my later teens I had accidentally become homeless for a brief time, spending a few weeks sofa surfing, sleeping in cars, and one memorable night attempting to sleep in a very very large orange bag on Tunbridge Wells Common. Recommendation; don’t do this, but if you’re absolutely forced to then Merrydown Mead is your friend. My lack of any fixed abode was very quickly resolved, thanks to the local area’s coolest dude Alt-Lovejoy.
In a small town you have a limited circle of close friends, but you are aware of almost everyone else. People with similar outlooks would eventually gravitate together, sometimes through a string of coincidences but often via an event, a party, or quite often the dole office. My close circle included my childhood friend and ally, the marvellously named Moon. He claimed to have acquired this coolest of nicknames as a result of his resemblance and similar character to Keith Moon, although a rival claim seemed to have more credibility. Dressed in his full mod refinery he had been set upon by skinheads at a party who insisted on walking up and down on him while The Police pounded out a suitable hit from the stereo.
Moon and I had fought our way through the bizarre atmosphere of a local school with an identity crisis, where most of the teaching staff seemed to have some sort of back story involving being held captive in a prisoner of war camp while the school itself had only managed to move away from caps and shorts the year before we arrived. It had a school song which suggested that The Empire was greatly missed and should be brought back as soon as possible. The weirdness of this educational establishment, where the headmaster being married to a bearded lady was just something you looked at and went ‘oh, yeah, makes sense’, had developed in us a similar view of education; it was not for us, even though we had no alternative plans to do anything else whatsoever. One afternoon we took the earliest opportunity that presented itself and staggered together out of of the school gates vowing never to return.
My freedom was absolute, but Moon’s family had insisted he should at least pretend to do something. After an idyllic summer spent hanging about in parks and lakes, three months later he was therefore reluctantly signed up to do Business Studies at West Kent College. After his first day we met to offer sympathy in the pub and he was holding his cigarette in a really weird way - burning part inside his cupped hand ‘to stop the wind from getting to it’. This affectation, it transpired, had been adopted from the coolest kid on his new course. Over a period of the next few weeks his clothes gradually changed, converting into a polar neck jumper, black pumps, a mac, skin tight jeans look, and he started getting really interested in Stax records. One evening in the back room of our favoured drinking hole, awaiting Moon’s arrival, a young chap walks in wearing exactly the same outfit, shielding his smokes from the non-existent wind, and I insistently knew this was the fabled coolest dude on the course.
Alt-Lovejoy was following his Father’s footsteps towards a life as an Antiques Dealer. His initial forays in this direction used to cause us a great deal of hilarity, as he would constantly turn up with tales of having been ripped off by nuns. His family were a key part of the local Catholic church, with its very strong community ties and its belief in supporting each other. This didn’t seem to extend to the nuns he encountered, who would constantly sell him items of furniture they had at the back of the church which would later turn out to be reproduction pieces with a value of about one tenth of the amount they had demanded from him. His reputation as a skillful negotiator was a constant source of amusement to us, including mocking him for his purchase of the ugliest chair we had ever seen. He claimed it’s incredibly badly sculpted eagles’ heads on each arm and it’s ludicrously uncomfortable shape indicated it was an incredibly rare piece by a very significant designer. We kept laughing at him about it for something like a year, right up until he walked into the pub one night and announced he’d sold it to a museum for a six figure sum.
Alt-Lovejoy was impossibly cool. Every move he made seemed like a black and white French movie being acted out in front of you. He walked like a panther, smoked like Steve McQueen, and carried off a dress and music sensibility way beyond his years. He also danced in a way which girls would find astonishing, consisting as it did of a sort of side to side shuffle between his almost immobile feet while he held his partially clenched fist directly in front of his trousers and moved it directly up and down in a manner which would have got him a well-paid job as a dancer in an inevitably banned Frankie Goes to Hollywood video. He played guitar, of course he did, a task he accomplished with a hipster swagger you imagined even Lou Reed would struggle to emulate.
Hearing of my orange bag accommodation situation, Alt-Lovejoy had not hesitated for a moment to go home and insist to his incredibly tolerant Mother that I should simply come and live with him. We had therefore taken up residence in the giant top attic room of his family house, where we would sit idly day after day working out how to play Land of a Thousand Dances in the style of the Velvet Underground. Alt Lovejoy had therefore played a key role in preventing me from becoming permanently homeless, a role he would now repeat some years later for our aspirations to find somewhere to house all the equipment and accouterments we had gathered around us hoping to one day make a music venue out of them.
Tunbridge Wells, despite its Royal epithet, was actually built on smuggler money. Contraband would make its ways from the coast at night and be hidden in the various caves and tunnels on which it had been built. The next day it would progress on into the big city, but not before the value of it had created various wealthy local gentry whose name’s still adorn the pubs and bars of the town. These fellows were of somewhat dubious origin, but their access to ready cash made them a very attractive proposition for people such as Beau Nash, a committed gambler and oddball who had appointed himself Master of Ceremonies in Tunbridge Wells and retained control of the entertainments provided for visitors until his death in 1761.
It was in the eponymously named Beau Nash one night that Alt-Lovejoy announced his intention to explore the smuggler origins of the town by setting off on a mission to visit all the long forgotten and hidden caves. This involved a great deal of night time activity lifting up manhole covers, sneaking down alleyways, and persuading ourselves down steps towards waterlogged bunkers, but it kept us busy while we tried to work out how to get a club up and running again. One particularly night after jumping over the gate to something described as ‘Friends Passage’ on the Pantiles, in search of a mythical tunnel that would link up to the King Charles the Martyr Church, we retired to the Duke of York and began a drinking game.
This game eventually took on a life of its own, involving the bar staff and every other customer, with the result that the hero of this chapter in my life, and unrecognised and under celebrated author of everything that would follow for the otherwise quiet and tranquil town, eventually staggered out from a lock in at the bar sometime around 2am to consider options to get him home in the rain. Settling on walking as being the only available method, he zigzagged his way across Frant Road, tripped over the kerb, attempted a quick dance, and promptly fell flat on his face in a puddle. From this puddle, his eyes rested on the old abandoned toilet block across the road sitting unloved on the common.
“That” he thought to himself, “would make an amazing music venue”.
Fonthill The Common was completed in 1939, opening in late May, just months before World War Two. It replaced several old buildings that had evolved over two hundred years, most notably a forge and stable. This rustic collection of buildings was eyed up by the Borough Council in 1918 as a potential site for public conveniences, something very important in tourist towns of that era. It took until 1931 for the site to finally be purchased from the Manor of Rusthall, and a further seven years to agree to demolish the existing buildings and start again. It’s important to understand that this wasn’t just any old public convenience. The Fonthill Restroom had a large central space, with arched doors, to sit and look out at The Common, plus Ladies and Gents toilets, with a huge number of cubicles and urinals distributed across both ends of the building. The advent of World War Two just after its opening immediately resulted in its temporary closure, and by the time the war had ended the grand vision of hordes of local folk nipping down to the common to relieve themselves had evaporated - not least because in between planning it in 1918 and finally opening it in 1945 a very large number of houses had miraculously acquired indoor toilets. Originally planned to be the largest toilet in Europe, local legend insisted that one end of it is slightly larger than the other because just before they completed it the local council found out about a massive privy in Hamburg and had to add a bit. We measured it once. I am going with ‘true’ for this particular legend.
The thing about Alt Lovejoy is that his brain didn’t work like anyone else I’d ever met. He was very much into the concept of possibility. This led him to buy eagle chairs off nuns, disappear down manhole covers, and look at disused toilets and think ‘that would make an amazing music venue’. The other thing that was decidedly different about him is that nearly everybody else I’ve ever met would have woken up slightly more sober, thought about it for thirty seconds, shrugged, laughed and forgotten about it. Alt Lovejoy was not like other people. By 10.30am the following morning he was wearing a shirt and a tie and had presented himself at the local council offices and insisted that he wanted to open a music venue in that toilet.
The local council officers couldn’t work out whether he was joking or not but decided to humour him. By 4pm that day, Mr Handsome, The Driver, Alt Lovejoy and I were stood in the middle of Europe’s largest toilet with a tape measure working out where the stage might go. Further obstacles to this mad scheme repeatedly presented themselves, but Alt Lovejoy always seemed to know someone, or be able to present things in a way, that could enable us to leap over them. Concerns about noise? Don’t worry dear chap, it’s going to mainly feature string quartets. Not appropriate for the area? It’s the Chalybeate Forum and will focus almost exclusively on celebrating the town’s history for its spring water in between classical concerts. Obviously the space had no alcohol licence, so he nipped down to a magistrates court one afternoon, greeted the presiding official with a cheery ‘Oh, hello Steven, I haven’t see you in ages’ and returned with a paper declaring that, yes, this was actually happening.
We were going to try to open our own music venue. In a huge public toilet.
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